Jeannie Ortiz’s fiber art practice in her ancestral desert homeland around Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, helps her fill in the gaps in her family’s history.
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico | jeannieortiz.com | @j.ortiz.art | Truth or Consequences Contemporary
Jeannie Ortiz’s life journey has taken her from an Arizona childhood to Montana, Mexico, and India—travels and locales that helped shape her artistic practice, which spans photography, ceramics, and fiber arts. But it is her ancestral desert homeland around Truth or Consequences along the Rio Grande Valley that now feeds her weaving practice.
Ortiz harvests raw materials from the land, gathering wild dyes from plants and fungi, spinning and weaving plant and animal fibers, and handweaving textiles that exist as fine art, functional objects, and elements of performances. “For me, learning about these plants as dyes, as food, as medicine—it’s like tapping into a blood memory,” she tells me.
After Ortiz’s great-grandparents entered New Mexico, fleeing violence during the Mexican Revolution, the family’s histories went silent: an act of erasure in order to assimilate to the U.S. “Nobody wanted to talk about their roots in Mexico. And now the people who held those stories are gone,” she explains. Finding herself back in her desert homeland, she sees her hands-on discovery of the flora, fauna, and geography of this place as conduits to her ancestry.
“Understanding how these plants live in their habitats, what medicines and food they can give us, it has uncovered a deeper understanding of my place in the world and how these elements of nature are the same as our bodies,” she explains. “The desert fills the silence in my own history.”
For her latest weaving, Stratigraphy, a monumental project she started in 2021, the artist employed 139 different wild-harvested dye colors sourced from across the Rocky Mountains, from Montana to New Mexico, that she processed and used to dye wool yarn. The final piece is an abstract map of her journey, its contours and coordinates defined by swaths of sage, rust, oxblood, and innumerable ochres.
The project “brought all the pieces together that I’ve been learning and exploring for the last ten years. The plants and mushrooms have this underlying essence. It’s interesting to bring that to life, to start to understand what these things mean in the context of my life, in the greater context of human life. I hope that through sharing my weaving, people can tap into that deep connection to nature.”
